Monday, April 30, 2012

Los Pekenikes

While driving down Roosevelt on my way to Scarecrow Video after a piano class up in Lake City on Saturday, I passed a used record store that I'd never seen before. My car suddenly turned onto a side street and ground to a halt. (Back in 2009 I had the technicians at the dealership program the computer in my Ford Escort so that the emergency brake would automatically engage whenever I drove past an unfamiliar record store.) I stepped from the car and made my way around the corner to Satisfaction Records & CDs and thumbed through some of their dusty bins. As a few of the reviewers on the store's Yelp page mention, much of the stuff at Satisfaction Records is overpriced (lots of non-rare LPs that you can get for $3 or even .99¢ at Jive Time or elsewhere are priced here at $9.99 or higher), but I did manage to find a few reasonably-priced gems for which I gladly forked over the amount listed on the sticker. One of those was this terrific, mostly-instrumental 1967 LP by Spanish quintet Los Pekenikes. Based solely on the info provided in the liner notes, I was trying to figure out which of the Pekenikes I'd have been best buddies with if I'd been living in Madrid in the late '60s. I couldn't decide between Tony—artistic, into world music, a collector of records—and Ignacio, who plays organ and piano, likes jazz, has a thick beard, and he's into "Physical Sciences," if you know what I mean. You can read about Los Pekenikes in Spanish on Wikipedia here, and LP liner notes in both English and Spanish are included below.